The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during the month of May 2023. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available) or a blurb (if available) if the publication is a book, along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in May 2023!
Continue reading “May 2023 Publication Roundup”
by Ashton Cynthia Clarke
As an Afro-Caribbean myself (first generation raised in the USA of Jamaican immigrant parents), I have some second-hand knowledge of the creolization of traditional African religions with the Christianity of colonizers. The slaves of British-held Jamaica embraced obeah; Santería practice flourished in the Spanish colonies; and French-held Haiti birthed Vodou (voodoo).
My mother was brought up Protestant and covered me in the Episcopal church from infant baptism until I left for college. Nevertheless, I would lay wide-eyed in bed after Mommy’s stories of naughty or even malevolent duppies (spirits) who blocked her path on the dark roads of northern Jamaica when she was a teen.
So, I was excited yet anxious to view “Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance” at The Fowler Museum at UCLA. What I did not expect was the overwhelming sense of belonging and possession I felt, surrounded by the luminous work of this artist whose Haitian ancestry is cousin to mine.
Myrlande Constant was born in 1968 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She is married and the mother of four; a photograph in the vestibule of the exhibit depicts two of her children intently engaged in bead work in Constant’s studio. She acknowledges her own mother as her primary artistic and spiritual influence. Constant learned the craft from her mother, who worked in a Port-au-Prince factory making beaded wedding dresses.
Drapo Vodou or “Voodoo Flag” are traditionally the work of practicing Vodou priests and their followers. They are displayed in Vodou sanctuaries and carried at ceremonies. While this is the art form that spawned Constant’s career, she introduced techniques such as stretching the fabric taut on a frame, employing a “tanbou stitch” (drum stitch), and substituting beads for the traditionally used sequins. These innovations have allowed for greater detail, enhanced color, perspective, and dimension in Constant’s pieces.
* * *
The wide-open doors at the entrance of the J. Paul Getty Trust Gallery served to frame the single rectangular piece that dominated a wall at the far end of the room. At that distance, I could only make out some splashes of color and the light that seemed to emanate from within the soul of the artwork itself. Counting steps as I went (6, 7, 8, 9 . . .), I felt pulled along—gently, but still pulled—towards the light which became more concentrated, absorbing and reflecting colors as I walked. I imagined this being as moving and tranquil as that “bright light” reported by people who had near-death experiences. Silly, huh?
As the drapo Vodou loomed larger and more defined (still counting 18, 19, 20, 21), I began to discern multiple figures. Thirty-four steps and I was close enough to identify the stitches and individual beads that created swaths of color and three-dimensionality on this flag, which was about five feet wide. The name of the piece: “Union des Esprits Sirenes,” a dark-skinned queen holding court amid spirits, sea creatures, musical instruments, and an inviting feast.
* * *
Before Constant began her artistic career, men had dominated the commercial flag-making field. She was the first female textile artist to open a workshop and the first to gain international recognition for her work.
Her beaded works are much heavier and larger than traditional sequined banners and they are often collected solely as art pieces. Still, the pieces depict the classic subjects of Vodou flags: Bondye (Creator/God), the lwa or loa (ancestral spirit), and vévé (symbol or image of the lwa). Vodouists believe that over a thousand lwa exist; one-fourth of them are named.
Each lwa has its own personality and is associated with specific colors, objects, food, chants, and drumbeats. It is believed that the interaction of lwa and vévés must be thoroughly and carefully considered by the artist. The religion and its rules must be observed as they can directly impact reality. Constant received advanced education in this area from her father, a Vodoun priest.
In “Milocan Tous les Saints Tous les Morts,” lwa fly overhead, involved in the day-to-day lives of the people. A Vodou flag, depicted front and center, features a prominent display of a vévé at the top of the flag.
Many of the lwa are equated with specific Roman Catholic saints based on similar characteristics or symbols. Similarly, a Jamaican obeahman or obeahwoman may summon spirits likened to the prophet Jeremiah or the apostle Peter. Hence, the fusion of these diverse religious beliefs; i.e., syncretism and/or creolization.
Vodouists were involved in the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1801, which overthrew the French colonial government, abolished slavery, and transformed the French-held island into the republic of Haiti. In later years, from 1835 to 1987, the Haitian government banned Vodou under laws that prohibited ritualistic practices (“Haitian Vodou,” Wikipedia).
Obeah became a crime for the first time because of a 1760 Jamaican law intended to prevent rebellions by slaves. The law was the Jamaican planters’ response to the biggest slave rebellion that took place in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean, which came to be known as Tacky’s Rebellion (Obeahhistories.org).
Vodou, like obeah, is practiced for healing, protection, and in some cases, to do harm. Unlike Jamaica, Haiti as a country seems to find no conflict between the Catholic faith and Vodou practice. In the video presentation accompanying the exhibit, Constant does state that she personally is no longer a working practitioner of Vodou, although she still holds the beliefs.
To this day, Jamaicans have an uneasy relationship with their spiritual folk practice. The 1898 Obeah Act outlawing the practice is still on the books, although rarely enforced ( (Obeahhistories.org). In this beautiful work, “Negre Danbala Wedo,” a healer administers a ceremony of curing and spiritual nourishment. I was transfixed. I remembered my mother.
* * *
One sunny afternoon, my Protestant mother rode the subway to Brooklyn to secretly consult a Jamaican obeahwoman. I say “secretly” because I can only imagine the conflicting feelings she had as a church-going believer in Christ. But Mommy was desperate. She had been suffering for years with debilitating headaches. Not migraines, the medical doctors said; but none offered a definitive diagnosis or solution.
Like most obeah “readers,” the woman in Brooklyn was a skilled herbalist, known for healing physical, spiritual, and mental disorders, and for protecting against malevolent spiritual forces. The obeahwoman said there was evil directed against my mother and her sister, from their childhoods up to the present. An evil that was meant for their demise. An evil now coming from a specific individual.
Following the consultation, Mommy and my aunt steered clear of that “specific individual.” Mommy’s headaches eventually vanished.
I had moved from New York City to Los Angeles ten years earlier. Mommy never confided in me about her trips to Brooklyn. My cousin shared this truth with me years later, after my mother passed away. It saddens me that perhaps Mommy felt her only daughter was too educated, even too disdainful of her culture to be open to offerings other than “Western” medicine and religion. I like to think I would have embraced her and understood.
* * *
In her Artist’s Statement, posted in the outer area of the exhibit, Constant writes: “An ancestral heritage is an important and weighty obligation. You cannot treat your ancestors and their culture lightly. . . . I don’t always know where my inspiration comes from, but it comes naturally. . . . There are things we cannot know. You must think and reflect to understand. These are the things I feel as a woman and as an artist.”
As always, different people will each have a different take-away from a piece of art. The shimmering, vibrant color of Myrlande Constant’s drapo Vodou, the painstaking detail, the investment of time for each piece (up to six months!)—those have universal appeal. Peculiar to me are recalling my mother’s pain, feeling ripped from my past by the crime of slavery, but somehow being soothed by an unexpected attachment to the Haitian lwa in Constant’s work. I believe you’ll enjoy something peculiar to you in “Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance.”
“Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance” will be on exhibit at The Fowler Museum at UCLA through July 16, 2023. Constant is the first Haitian woman to have a solo museum show in the U.S.
Biographical information on Constant and the drapo-making process gleaned from her website and Indigo Arts.
Ashton Cynthia Clarke is an African American/Afro-Caribbean, Los Angeles-based storyteller and writer of creative non-fiction. She has work published or forthcoming in The Storytelling Bistro, Olney Magazine, and Inlandia. Ashton has performed her true, personal stories on stages throughout the L.A. area and New York City, as well as virtually. She thanks Lisbeth Coiman for introducing her to Women Who Submit.
Instagram: @ashton.c.clarke
The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during the month of April 2023. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available) or a blurb (if available) if the publication is a book, along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in April 2023!
Continue reading “April 2023 Publication Roundup”
by Joy Notoma
After I attended a virtual event hosted by Barnard College called Creation Is Everything You Do: Shange, The Sisterhood & Black Collectivity about the history of The Sisterhood, a community of Black women writers who met in the 70s founded by Alice Walker and June Jordan in New York City, Denmark-based Women Who Submit chapter member, Jeannetta Craigwell-Graham, who also attended, texted me: “We need that here. The sisterhood.” From there, we began imagining a workshop and retreat for other Black women writers who live in Europe.
In the photo of members of The Sisterhood that circulates around the internet, they are gathered in front of a photo of Bessie Smith, a spot they chose for the photo because they wanted to honor her unapologetic creative spirit. According to scholar Courtney Thorsson, The Sisterhood was a place for Black women writers to reject the notion that there could only be one successful Black woman writer per generation. They recognized the need to support and uplift one another rather than falling into the traps of competitiveness and division. They met monthly, collected dues, and kept minutes. Further, they were more interested in creating a platform where they celebrated each other’s work than they were with trying to be accepted by white readers — they were each other’s most valuable audience. They edited and published one another and taught each other’s work in their courses. They also provided emotional and psychological support when members faced public backlash, like when Ntozake Shange’s chorepoem, “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf” was derided by audiences who weren’t ready to see Black women’s vulnerability and power performed so unapologetically on Broadway.
Black women writers in Europe live at an important intersection. Writing takes immense courage. No one should do it alone and living abroad sometimes means you have little to no community. When expats gather, it’s usually under the umbrella of meet ups that include transplants from numerous backgrounds, where the focus isn’t on the shared connections of Black women who happen to be scattered among the crowd. While some luxury writing retreats for Black women exist, there are no workshop spaces specifically for Black women writers who live in Europe, as far as I can tell. With this undertaking, Jeannetta and I hope to offer a long weekend where writers can focus on their craft, have their pieces workshopped, and enjoy time together, strengthening the community, at an affordable cost.
When I started the Europe chapter of Women Who Submit, I had a similar notion of a community of women writers coming together to support each other’s writing journeys. Even though I avoid assuming that I’ll make friends with other people who live abroad just on the basis of the shared experience of living in a foreign country (even if they are writers), I was inspired enough by the mission of Women Who Submit to believe that gathering writers from across Europe and the UK to start a virtual chapter of Women Who Submit would be an endeavour which aligned with my ideals. Now that I am nearly two years into leading the first international chapter of Women Who Submit with members in Romania, Germany, Portugal, The UK, The Netherlands, Denmark, France, Spain, and Austria, I can confidently say that supporting other women writers who have made lives in foreign lands and who understand the complicated emotional tangle of making a home and creating art far away from the familiar was indeed a good idea. The members were already accomplished and on their way to meeting their writing goals, but our Women Who Submit chapter provides encouragement to continue meeting those goals, and a container of accountability, a place where we can ask questions, celebrate acceptances and rejections, articulate our monthly goals, all of which helps the writing process in innumerable ways. I hope The Black Women Writers in Europe workshop-retreat will be similarly valuable. It’s a space we desperately need.
Another reason that I’m passionate about gathering women writers who live abroad is because, as a Black American woman writer living in Europe, I am treading on the history of African Americans making waves in the literary landscape in this part of the world. James Baldwin lived and died in St. Paul-de-Vences, a small town which is just five hours from where I live in France. Audre Lorde first came to Germany in 1984 as a visiting scholar at the Free University of Berlin. She regularly visited Germany until 1992 and mentored Black women feminist writers in Berlin, which inspired the creation of ADEFRA in 1986 (which stands for Afro-German Women in German), a grassroots activist group of black feminist writers and artists that was the first of its kind and still exists today. There was also Jessie Fauset, novelist and co-editor with WEB DuBois of The Crisis, who was also the first editor to publish Langston Hughes. Fauset traveled in France and Algeria, taught French, and wrote fiction that interrogated colorism among African Americans. Richard Wright also spent significant time in Paris. These are only some of the most recognizable names. Besides writers, Black painters like Beauford Delaney and entertainers like Josephine Baker and Eartha Kitt made impressions on the cultural landscape of Europe which still exists today. Even for Black artists who never actually lived in Europe, the influence of their work and of Black American culture in the European consciousness is undeniable. It is impossible for me to not sense that history as I live and write here. I believe that the creative process is a spiritual communion with ancestors and all of the writer’s notions of the Divine. My ancestors include members of my family and artists whose work guides my life (spiritual ancestors), like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Ntozake Shange, most of whom were members of The Sisterhood. I look at this undertaking as an honoring of the legacy of African American artists in Europe and the legacy of our literary foremothers who gathered together in the name of art and sisterhood. Learn more about our upcoming inaugural gathering here.
Joy Notoma’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Epiphany, The Woodward Review, Longreads, and Ploughshares. She is a fellow of Roots.Wounds.Words and Kimbilio, and an alum of Tin House and Hurston/Wright. She hosts Emerging Writers Community Podcast, a live podcast focused on the work of BIPOC emerging writers. She is writing a novel.
